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Ideas

Email news gateway

  • Dan Dixon

I dont really know if web censorship is such a big issue or not to the beeb. There seems to me to be plenty of ways to get around censorship... and here's another. To allow BBC news into places like China. Email a request to a 3rd party that isnt blocked, that grabs news stories from BBC news RSS and sends it back. Navigation by menu driven commands. A bit like ye olde compuserve but via email. The beauty of this is that you can create disposable email addresses to read the news rather than relying on regular newsletters and finding the thought police at your local cybercafe. Would anyone use it?

  • 05 May 2005 05:41 PM

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  • 1.
  • On 31 Mar 2005 06:41 PM,
  • Brendan said:

Wow, I'd forgotten about this, I had the same idea years ago.

I figured you could scrape out all URLs and include them as numbered reply addresses. But these days I guess you could assume that everyone -- even in China -- has an HTML-capable reader so you could just click on the link to generate a mailto: address with the URL encoded.

You might even be able to fill out forms through some kind of proxy??

So who wants to build it? I could help!

Brendan.

  • 2.
  • On 12 May 2005 12:21 AM,
  • Andy said:

I might be interested in building a prototype or something, but I know pretty much nothing except PHP (although I'd be willing to learn what I can).

I would guess that you could make a table of the last week's stories and their URLs and md5 the URL, or perhaps encode the URL with a secret key, and decode it when the client makes a request.

Andy

  • 3.
  • On 12 May 2005 09:27 AM,
  • Kerry said:

This is quite easy to do with a Unix/Linux server. In fact, there used to be a lot of ftp file transfer by email services. There probably still are. But I used to use them at a job that only had email access.

I also wrote my own scripts that ran on a Unix shell account I had that procmail would read the incoming emails and reply back with the webpage requested using lynx which is a text based browser. Lynx will also send the list of links contained in that page if you call it differently.


But there is a lot out there already. Instead of reinventing the wheel:

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/internet-services/access-via-email/

  • 4.
  • On 12 May 2005 04:14 PM,
  • Jonathan Stowe said:

First step is get the content in plain text suitable for sending by e-mail - I have put a prototype up here:

http://www.its-going-to-be-fabulous.com/cgi-bin/newsgate.pl


This will be the backend - I am working on the mail gateway at the minute.

  • 5.
  • On 12 May 2005 05:04 PM,
  • Jonathan Stowe said:

Okay I have something working now.

You can try it out by sending mail to mailto:headlines@its-going-to-be-fabulous.com

It's very much a prototype at the moment, doesn't deal particularly well with MIME messages and will get crucified by bouncing addresses, but it works :-)

  • 6.
  • On 12 May 2005 11:49 PM,
  • Tom Payne said:

This is a great idea - I'd love to be involved. However, the Chinese authorities seem fairly adept at censoring all outgoing and incoming traffic (sorry, I know it's long):

[quote from="http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=10749"]
The architecture of the Chinese Internet was designed from the outset to allow information control. There are just five backbones or hubs through which all traffic must pass. No matter what ISP is chosen by Internet users, their e-mails and the files they download and send must pass through one of these hubs.

China then acquired state-of-the-art technology and equipment from US companies. Cisco Systems has sold China several thousand routers ...for use in building the regime's surveillance infrastructure. It allows the authorities to read data transmitted on the Internet and to spot "subversive" key words. The police are able to identify who visits banned sites and who sends "dangerous" e-mail messages.

[/quote]
[from Reporters Without Borders].
If I'm right, email traffic appears to be more closely monitored when sent than received, so this way could be ideal. As long as we can ensure there aren't any "dangerous" keywords in the "get" request...

The other problem, of course, is to find an accessible but changing email address to send requests to. Hmm.

If I can get involved in any way, let me know - I'm a web developer, all the usual front end (XHTML, CSS, XML) and some python and other proper programming stuff.

Read the full article here http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=10749

New to the site and just same across this thread. I build something similar in PHP recently. have a look at www.morethanseven.net/email2rss

Basically you send an email to the specified email address with bbc or other specified keywords in the subject line and retrieve the latest headlines back.

I'll post the source if anyone is interested when I get time. Just drop me an email

Micz Flor developed something like this a few years ago. You simply emailed a link to a server that retrieved the web page and replied with an email containing the text of the page. Problem is, you'd have to know the URL of the page you wanted.

http://web.archive.org/web/20040208133040/browse.mi.cz/

  • 9.
  • On 18 Jul 2005 10:43 AM,
  • Nir Yariv said:

You might find this site useful:

http://rails.yanime.org/rssfwd/

Basically, it converts RSS to email so one can subscribe to one of the BBC feeds and get new stories emailed to you.


BTW, I have a few PHP scripts that I use as my own feed->email gateway. If anyone's interested in building such a service, I'd be happy to share them - niryariv@gmail.com

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